Anyone can make predictions about what the future holds. Last year we produced our third annual Social trends report. This labor of love (and research--a lot of research) took a look at five big trends we predicted would take off in 2018, and what these meant for businesses around the globe. As we start looking towards 2019, we thought it would be a great time to check-in on how our predictions from last year panned out. Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence. As we looked towards 2018, our research indicated a sharp focus on social ROI.

The four bronze lions that surround Nelson's Column in London's Trafalgar Square are pretty passive-looking creatures. They sit on all fours and gaze blankly ahead, more sphinx than lion. Legend has it that their sculptor originally planned for the animals to be posed in more active stances, stood up on their hind legs and roaring at the square. But Queen Victoria reportedly vetoed the decision as too shocking. Now, 151 years after they were originally unveiled, the lions have a new colleague, and he is definitely turning heads.

Here are 21 commands that even seasoned Echo users may not know. Many of them are useful, some are fun, and others give the illusion that Alexa is as cognizant as we are. Alexa is no longer "new." The smart-tech revolution is now in full swing, and Amazon Echo is at the heart of it. According to Edison Research, nearly 40 million people own voice-activated speakers, which is about one in six U.S. adults.

We present Piano Genie, an intelligent controller which allows non-musicians to improvise on the piano. With Piano Genie, a user performs on a simple interface with eight buttons, and their performance is decoded into the space of plausible piano music in real time. To learn a suitable mapping procedure for this problem, we train recurrent neural network autoencoders with discrete bottlenecks: an encoder learns an appropriate sequence of buttons corresponding to a piano piece, and a decoder learns to map this sequence back to the original piece. During performance, we substitute a user's input for the encoder output, and play the decoder's prediction each time the user presses a button. To improve the interpretability of Piano Genie's performance mechanics, we impose musically-salient constraints over the encoder's outputs.

Yes, I've read the "Comma Sutra," but I only bend one way, so please don't ask. Quotation Mark My last girlfriend "dumped" me because she said I didn't "know" myself well enough to "get" what to do with myself, let "alone" a "girlfriend." Plus, she said it was "annoying" how I kept "coming up" with "sayings" that I thought were "deep." Other things to know about me: I don't "believe" in love. Also, "Love is a sentence.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. There are small things you can do to your home to make it feel a little more luxurious. From a fresh coat of paint to a few more throw pillows these little things make your home feel refreshed. Aside from changing up your interior, you can still buy a few things without spending too much that will give your home a serious upgrade.

They cooed, flapped their wings and stared at me, as if begging for a treat. My dreams of being surrounded by the adorable alien birds from Star Wars have come true. Okay, there were only two porgs. They were actually a part of Lucasfilm's ILMxLAB demo at LeapCon, Magic Leap's inaugural developer conference, where I managed to try out several different augmented reality experiences with the company's recently revealed AR glasses. I watched a Shakespearean play, interacted with a digital human, planted seeds on a planet, rode a robot into the stars and, yes, I played with porgs.

The BBC had to replace live broadcasts with recorded material on its TV news channels for about an hour on Wednesday following a technical glitch. The News at Six was also presented from the BBC's Millbank studio instead of its usual home of New Broadcasting House. The issue affected OpenMedia, a new computer system rolled out across BBC News outlets over the past six months. OpenMedia supplier Annova has been helping to investigate the fault. Engineers believe they have now addressed the problem.

Court is now in session, and author Robert J. Sawyer makes the case for leveraging AI to improve ethics and fairness in civil society. With 23 novels under his belt, as well as scores of short stories, scripts, treatments and more, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer is not shy about exploring the technological and cultural landscape of our future. Among the many works in his remarkable and widely regarded career, he authored the trilogy WWW (as in Wake, Watch and Wonder) in which a blind teenage girl uses advanced medical technology to augment her vision, only to discover a super-AI consciousness called Webmind that uses the Internet to grow. During the series, Sawyer investigates the possible consequences that such a super-AI could unleash upon society, and how humans might respond. For his perspective on how humanity might relate to future artificial intelligences and what shape those interactions may take, we asked Sawyer about the dynamics of judgment and control; he also shared his overall sentiment on AI development.

In the coming battle of the talking video speakers, Google is selling YouTube, Amazon looks to Prime Video and with Facebook, it's about the social network. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in offering the next wave of home speakers, Alexa with a twist, with a video display. Facebook came out on Monday with its video portal. On Tuesday, Google introduced Google Home Hub, an update to its popular Google Home speaker, a new device with a video screen that's all about Google. Amazon will be first to stores, with the revamped and larger Echo unit available Thursday, while Google's Home Hub, an extension of the Home speaker line, will be released on October 22nd.